The Blair Peace Project: Serial warmonger’s call for new Iraq war will have opposite effect

Neil Clark is a journalist, writer, broadcaster and blogger. He has written for many newspapers and magazines in the UK and other countries including The Guardian, Morning Star, Daily and Sunday Express, Mail on Sunday, Daily Mail, Daily Telegraph, New Statesman, The Spectator, The Week, and The American Conservative. He is a regular pundit on RT and has also appeared on BBC TV and radio, Sky News, Press TV and the Voice of Russia. He is the co-founder of the Campaign For Public Ownership @PublicOwnership. His award winning blog can be found at www.neilclark66.blogspot.com. He tweets on politics and world affairs @NeilClark66

Kurdish Peshmerga forces fire missiles during clashes with militants of the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIL) jihadist group in Jalawla in the Diyala province, on June 14, 2014 (AFP Photo / Rick Findler) / AFP

​Being a warmongering NeoCon, and in particular being a warmongering NeoCon called Tony Blair, means never having to accept responsibility for the consequences of your actions.

What it does mean is shifting the blame on to others and trying
to rewrite history.

You might have thought that someone who launched an illegal,
disastrous war against a sovereign state that has led to the
deaths of up to 1 million people and who made claims before the
war which proved to be false, might show at the very least a
measure of contrition when the country in question is overrun by
radical Islamist groups who had no presence in the country before
the illegal invasion took place. But Tony Blair’s 2,800 word
essay on Iraq and Syria and the Middle East is so full
of distortions and ludicrous claims that it’s hard to know where
to begin.

The man who repeatedly told us that Saddam Hussein possessed
weapons of mass destruction (WMDs) in the buildup to the war in
2003 now tries to justify it on the grounds that another Middle
East leader, President Bashar Assad of Syria, used chemical
weapons in 2013 and that if left in power, Saddam would have gone
back to using them.

If you’re confused by that, you’re not the only one. Even if it
were to be conclusively proved that the Syrian government did use
chemical weapons at Ghouta (and it most certainly hasn’t been)
the fact remains that Iraq did not possess WMDs in 2003.

“Before people crow about the absence of weapons of mass
destruction I suggest they wait a bit. I remain confident they
will be found,” Blair said on April 28, 2003. Over eleven
years on, we’re still waiting.

Now Blair is saying that while Saddam had “got rid of the
physical weapons” it was likely that he would have gone back
to them at a later date. So, in other words, a war which has cost
the lives of up to 1 million people is justified not because Iraq
had WMDs in 2003 but because Saddam might have developed WMDs
later on. Talk about moving the goalposts.

The war was clearly not about the threat from such weapons as, if
the ruling elites in US and Britain had genuinely believed that
Iraq possessed WMDs, they would not have dared to invade the
country. Iraq was attacked not because it possessed WMDs but
because it did not – and the US and UK knew that it did not.

Blair then goes on to use the so-called 2011 Arab Spring as a
justification for the 2003 Iraq war.

He hypothesizes that a Saddam-led Iraq in 2011 would have been
caught up in the wave of protests sweeping across the Arab world
and Saddam and his sons would have fought to stay in power.

So a war in 2003 is justified because eight years later, a leader
who might still have been in power might have put down internal
revolt with repression and the conflict might have spread and
turned into a “full-blown sectarian war across the
region.” That’s a bit like saying “let's launch a war
with China now because if there’s a wave of unrest in the Far
East in eight years’ time the Chinese leadership might respond in
the same way they did in 1989 with the Tiananmen Square massacre
and that the conflict might spread beyond China’s borders.”

In any case, we’re very close to a “full-blown sectarian war
across the region” today without Saddam Hussein or his sons
being in power – and precisely because of Blair's policies.

Galloway proved right

Blair also tried to muddy the waters about the rise of Al-Qaeda
and similar radical Islamist groups in Iraq, and ignores the fact
that such groups had no presence in the country before the 2003
invasion. It wasn’t hard to foresee that toppling a secular
Ba’athist regime, which acted as a bulwark against Islamic
fundamentalism, would give a big boost to religious extremists.
“Like it or not the most likely alternatives to the secular
regimes of Assad in Syria and Saddam in Iraq would be militant
Islamic ones,” I wrote in the Spectator in March 2002.

I remember going to a public meeting at which the anti-war MP
George Galloway warned that invading Iraq would destabilize the
entire region for years to come. Galloway was proved right and
his pro-war detractors wrong, yet now Blair and other supporters
of the war want us to intervene again in Iraq against the radical
Islamist forces that did not exist in Iraq prior to the toppling
of Saddam Hussein. Instead of accepting responsibility for the
current turmoil, the serial regime-changers have shamefully tried
to pass the blame on to others. Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri
al-Maliki is the latest fall guy. “The sectarianism of the
Maliki government snuffed out what was a genuine opportunity to
build a cohesive Iraq,” Blair says. His fellow NeoCon Liam
Fox, a former British Defense Secretary, joined in the attacks,
saying that the response of Iraq government forces to the
Islamist rebels has been “pretty pathetic.”

Yet the warmongers who bemoan the fact that al-Maliki hasn’t been
a strong enough leader do not tell us that the last Iraqi leader
who was a “strongman,” Saddam Hussein, was forcibly
removed by them and the governing apparatus of the country
destroyed. The West did not want a strong Iraq, but a weakened,
divided country that would never again be a regional power.

It’s been NeoCon policy to target and oust Middle Eastern leaders
who have been opponents of Islamic fundamentalism – think of the
campaigns against Hussein, Gaddafi and Assad – yet they want us
now to blame others for the advances made by radical Islamic
terror groups in the region.

Most grotesquely of all, Blair calls for more Western
interventions to put right the damage caused by previous Western
interventions. We have to do something about radical Islamists
taking over in Iraq, yet for the past few years the Western
elites have been doing all they can to topple a secular
government in neighboring Syria which has been fighting against
the very same radical Islamists.

Outrage is expressed, and rightly so, when pictures were posted
which appeared to show the mass execution of Iraqi soldiers by
ISIS/ISIL, yet there’s been silence from
Western elite figures when soldiers have been killed by the same
forces in Syria. The double standards are there for all to see.
Why do we need air strikes to stop radical Islamists in Iraq, but
air strikes against a government battling radical Islamists in
Syria? Why are jihadists very bad in Iraq, but not so bad in
Syria?

If governing elites in the US and UK had genuinely been concerned
with countering Al-Qaeda and radical Islamists in the Middle East
they would not have forcibly toppled Saddam, they would not have
forcibly toppled Gaddafi and they would not have spent years
trying to forcibly topple Bashar al-Assad. They would also not be
closely allying themselves with Middle East states that do
sponsor religious extremists, such as Saudi Arabia and Qatar.

But we’re all expected to ignore these contradictions and to
rally behind the latest NeoCon “intervention.” “We have to
act now,” Blair cries. The trouble is that there has already
been far too much western action in the Middle East- whether it’s
been the invasion of Iraq, the bombing of Libya or the support
given to ‘rebels’ fighting to overthrow the government in Syria.

Blair’s claims have brought attacks from within the British
establishment, including from those who supported the Iraq war.
“I have come to the conclusion that Tony Blair has finally
gone mad,” writes leading Conservative Party politician and
Mayor of London, Boris Johnson.

Johnson quite rightly ridicules Blair’s assertions, but his main
concern seems to be – like many other establishment critics of
the former prime minister – that he has ruined the case for
further military “interventions.”

“The Iraq war was a tragic mistake; and by refusing to accept
this, Blair is now undermining the very cause he advocates – the
possibility of serious and effective intervention,” Johnson
laments.

While reading Blair’s essay makes the blood boil, we must look on
the bright side. Blair the Serial Warmonger has become a huge
asset to the anti-war movement, as there’s no one out there who
can turn so many people off the cause of Western intervention.

Let's hope he’s hard at work on writing another essay.

The statements, views and opinions expressed in this column are solely those of the author and do not necessarily represent those of RT.